1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus and an optical adjustment method, and is particularly appropriate to be applicable to an image capturing apparatus such as a digital video camera or a digital camera having a zoom mechanism.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the past, digital cameras using image pickup devices such as CCD (Charge Coupled Device) and CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) have spread rapidly, and have become general.
As described above, as the digital cameras have becomes general, user demand for a decrease in size, an increase in angle of view, and an increase in magnification particularly of the digital cameras integrally formed with a lens has become strong. Furthermore, recently, there is a tendency to increase the number of pixels of the image pickup device every year, and thus the demand for an increase in image quality has also become strong.
However, there is a problem in that the peripheral light amounts at the four corners of the image pickup surface of the image pickup device in the wide-angle end state in a lens design are lowered by the influence of the decrease in size and the increase in angle of view. In addition, there is also a problem in lowering in amount of the peripheral light caused by asymmetry (unbalance) of amounts of peripheral light due to manufacturing variation.
On the other hand, due to the demand for an increase in image quality, the anti-vibration mechanism has come into widespread use. However, there have been proposed control methods for correcting the deviation, which occurs between the center position of the image pickup device and the optical axis of the lens groups for each zoom position, by using an anti-vibration lens group (for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-49598, and Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2006-64986).